About Done!

Long day in the workshop today to get pretty much everything finished. Built the engine up this morning, nothing to really say about that as its just bolting bits back together. I've used a set of Hill Powers PTFE gaskets though and will be testing these on the rollers to gather some data on them.

I spent a lot of time fettling the cam timing to ensure it was absoluely spot on and some nice chaps in France provided some cam timing data that may prove to be worthwhile. We'll see if its made any difference as they were on a slightly different cam spec to what I have in the lump at the moment.

The airbox won't be here until next week so in the mean time I had a hunt around, found a cone filter and knocked up a Clio Cup alike solution. Theres no way of getting any ambient air flow to it as I have two working headlights so its very much a temporary solution. Don't think there won't be a big chunk of carbon fibre in the engine bay very shortly!

Also plumbed the catch tank in. I've ordered some decent Samco to do it with but for the meantime its cobbled together from bits I had spare ;-)

The battery has now moved to the boot. I've used an Oddysey PC625 as this is about as small as you can go without ending up stuck somewhere if you've had the stereo on for ten minutes. It's mounted in the rear most right hand corner of the boot to offset some of the weight of the driver/engine. It's so light it'll make bugger all difference but hey it won't hurt either! The original battery/power feeds are retained in the engine bay and terminate in a distribution box which is then fed from the boot mounted battery. The cable used is default 25mm2 which is rated for 170amps, in reality thats more than sufficent - I've seen big V8's crank their way back to the pits on the starter motor during endurance races on this stuff with no problem! As its a road car I won't be having a battery cut off switch but there will be a Tyco Type electronic relay going in so I can easily chop the power off if the car ends up sitting for a few weeks.

I drove the car back to Cambridge this evening and gave it a good kicking to ensure all was well. It pulls straight into the rev limiter with no tail off as per the standard car and thats on the standard ECU Calibration - looking forward to seeing what it makes on the rollers and how it drives once a new cal is done. Idle quality is very slightly worse it doesn't struggle to idle but you can tell there is a bit more overlap in there than standard! Sub 2000RPM is a touch flatter but once over this its fine with quite a wedge more torque availble at circa 4000RPM, it'll put quite impressively in 5th from 80mph.

I'm happy with it - I'm going to use this engine to prototype a fabricated short runner intake manifold up on then build a nice shiny, zero KM spec lump for it which ought to see the shell out realisticaly. This lump isn't bad but its got nigh on 100K on it and for the money it'd cost to refresh and remachine it there isn't a lot of difference in cost - a lot less work though! :-)

Oh and with the filter so close to the TB and completely open its stupidly, rediculously loud LOL